The present invention relates to computer-based document management systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a computer-based document management system that has the capability of importing, organizing, browsing, searching, and viewing paper-based documents and electronic documents of any type or format from various sources.
In today""s business environment, most businesses, from small businesses to large corporate entities, organize and maintain a tremendous amount of information, particularly information in the form of paper-based documents and electronic documents. The task of organizing and maintaining such a large number of documents, can, and typically is, a time consuming and costly matter.
In response, the computer industry, particularly the computer software industry, offers a number of computer application programs designed to help mitigate this problem. Some of these computer application programs work in conjunction with optical scanners to automatically import paper-based documents into a host computer. Other application programs are directed more specifically at providing electronic file management services-for existing electronic documents. Some of the more advanced computer application programs attempt to integrate a number of different capabilities into a single application program. Among the capabilities that some of the more advanced programs provide are automated document importing, storage, manipulation, retrieval, indexing, and document annotation.
However, despite the many features already offered by existing software products, there is still a need to improve the efficiency of these products. This is especially true with respect to the way in which these prior products import, store, and otherwise organize electronic documents within a document collection. For example, current products do not provide an efficient way in which to import documents into a single document collection, nor do they provide an efficient way in which to continuously and automatically update the document collection as new documents are added, and as existing documents are modified and/or deleted. Existing software products also do not efficiently manage document collections consisting of documents that exhibit one of many different data formats. In addition, existing products do not efficiently store documents in memory, especially wherein documents may appear to be stored in and/or linked to more than one location and/or document category. Consequently, managing a large document collection can be a formidable task even with the assistance of various software products presently on the market. Therefore, the ability to automatically import, store, organize and manipulate the document collection with minimal user interaction, and to do so in a most memory efficient way, would be most desirable.
The present invention is directed to a method for managing documents in a computer-based system. The present invention provides a number of improvements over prior methods, particularly, the way in which the present invention indexes, categorizes and stores a wide range of documents and document types in its electronic database.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to standardize the way in which document information is maintained regardless of document type or document format.
It is another object of the present invention to automatically index and categorize a large quantity of paper-based and electronic documents and document types.
It is another object of the present invention to efficiently and automatically store, browse, and view a large quantity of paper-based and electronic documents.
It is still another object of the present invention to automatically modify and/or manipulate a large quantity of paper-based and electronic documents.
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, the foregoing and other objects are achieved by a method of managing a document collection in a computer system that involves importing a document into the computer system; then storing the document in a memory location; automatically extracting attribute data from the document; and generating a data structure for the document. Moreover, the data structure contains the attribute data in a standardized format regardless of document type or document format.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, the foregoing and other objects are achieved by a computer-readable storage medium that has stored therein a program which is capable of importing a document into a computer-based system; storing the document in memory; automatically extracting attribute data from the document; and generating a data structure corresponding to the document. The data structure generated by the program contains the extracted attribute data in a standardized format regardless of document type or document format.